Great Throughts Treasury

"Modern man in the artificial world of his cities and towns...often forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of its history, in which the existence of the race of men has occupied a mere moment of time."

"Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss with you this morning the problems of environmental hazards and the control of pesticides. The contamination of the environment with harmful substances is one of the major problems of modern life. The world of air and water and soil supports not only the hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants, it supports man himself. In the past we have often chosen to ignore this fact. Now we are receiving sharp reminders that our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves. The problem you have chosen to explore is one that must be resolved in our time. I feel strongly that a beginning must be made on it now, -- in this session of Congress. For this reason I was delighted when I heard, Mr. Chairman, that you were planning to hold hearings on the whole vast problem of environmental pollution. Contamination of various kinds has now invaded all of the physical environment that supports us -- water, soil, air, and vegetation. It has even penetrated that internal environment within the bodies of animals and of men. It comes from many sources: radioactive wastes from reactors, laboratories and hospitals, fallout from nuclear explosions, domestic wastes from cities and towns; chemical wastes from factories, detergents from homes and industries."

"In his various writings, we may read Dr. Schweitzer's philosophical interpretations of that phrase. But to many of us, the truest understanding of Reverence for Life comes, as it did to him, from some personal experience, perhaps the sudden, unexpected sight of a wild creature, perhaps some experience with a pet. Whatever it may be, it is something that takes us out of ourselves, that makes us aware of other life. From my own memories, I think of the sight of a small crab alone on a dark beach at night, a small and fragile being waiting at the edge of the roaring surf, yet so perfectly at home in its world. To me it seemed a symbol of life, and of the way life has adjusted to the forces of its physical environment. Or I think of a morning when I stood in a North Carolina marsh at sunrise, watching flock after flock of Canada geese rise from resting places at the edge of a lake and pass low overhead. In that orange light, their plumage was like brown velvet. Or I have found that deep awareness of life and its meaning in the eyes of a beloved cat."

"In the Salt Pond itself live many inhabitants of the intertidal zone, the area which is exposed only at low tide? Most of the brown-green seaweeds growing on the rocks are either rockweeds or knotted wrack. At very low tide, one can see a species of red algae called Irish moss, which may also be green or purple. Other seaweeds such as kelp, sea collander, or dulse, which do not normally grow in the intertidal zone, may wash up here. Living between or sharing the rocks with the seaweeds are several kinds of mollusks [and] three species of periwinkles (snails)? Preying on these mollusks are dogwinkles or whelks? Hermit and green crabs are also abundant in the Salt Pond. Common starfish and green sea urchins are found occasionally."

"It occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly ? for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural. For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end. That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it ? so I hope, may you. Thank you for this morning."

"For the child? it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused - a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love - then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response... It is more important to pave the way for a child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts that he is not ready to assimilate."

"Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces."

"Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe ? and I do believe ? that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction."

"Somewhere we should know what was nature's way; we should know what the earth would have been had not man interfered. And so, besides public parks for recreation, we should set aside some wilderness areas of sea-shore where the relations of sea and wind and shore?of living things and their physical world?remain as they have been over the long vistas of time in which man did not exist."

"My research has taken very deep digging into the realms of physiology and biochemistry and genetics, to say nothing of chemistry. But I now feel that a lot of isolated pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have suddenly fallen into place."

"Raise a question that is not only scientific but moral. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized . . . These creatures [wild and domestic] are innocent of any harm to man. Indeed, by their very existence they and their fellows make his life more pleasant. Yet he rewards them with a death that is not only sudden but horrible."

"Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is ? or should be ? the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all ? perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows."

"The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."

"The changes and the evolution of new ways of life are natural and on the whole desirable."

"Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith."

"Reject the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."

"The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind - that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. . . . Now I can believe I have at least helped a little"

"The chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire."

"The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place."

"The most alarming of all man?s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world?the very nature of its life."

"The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster."

"The fact that man, like all other living creatures, is part of the vast ecosystems of the earth, subject to the forces of the environment,? she argued, was on a par with (and ultimately inseparable from) Darwin?s theory of evolution. The obvious corollary of such an evolutionary-ecological view is that ?man is affected by the same environmental influences that control the lives of all the many thousands of other species to which he is related by evolutionary ties."

"The ocean is a place of paradoxes."

"The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth ? soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics."

"There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings? Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change? There was a strange stillness? The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh."

"These insects are so essential to our agriculture and indeed to our landscape as we know it, deserve something better from us than the senseless destruction of their habitat."

"The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

"This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits."

"To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right."

"To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives."

"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

"Undersea, the various forms of life are re-dissolved into their component substance, as a result of the inexorable laws of the sea. Consequently, individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality."

"What happens? when the public interest is pitted against large commercial interests?"

"We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow."

"We still talk in terms of conquest? I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves."

"Who has decided ? who has the right to decide ? for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative."

"When we review the history of mankind in relation to the earth we cannot help feeling somewhat discouraged, for that history is for the most part that of the blind or short-sighted despoiling of the soil, forests, waters and all the rest of the earth's resources. We have acquired technical skills on a scale undreamed of even a generation ago. We can do dramatic things and we can do them quickly; by the time damaging side effects are apparent it is often too late, or impossible, to reverse our actions. These are unpleasant facts, but they have given rise to the disturbing situations that this committee has now undertaken to examine."

"When I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, studying under the great geneticist H. S. Jennings, the whole biological community was stirring with excitement over the recent discovery of another distinguished geneticist, Professor H. J. Muller, then at the University of Texas. Professor Muller had found that by exposing organisms to radiation he could produce those sudden changes in hereditary characteristics that biologists call mutations. Before this it had been assumed that the germ cells were immutable?immune to influences in the environment. Muller?s discovery meant that it was possible for many, by accident or design, to change the course of heredity, although the nature of the changes could not be controlled. It was much later that two Scottish investigators discovered that certain chemicals have a similar power to produce mutations and in other ways to imitate radiation. This was before the days of the modern synthetic pesticides, and the chemical used in these experiments was mustard gas. But over the years it has been learned that one after another of the chemicals used as insecticides or as weed-killers has power to produce mutations in the organisms tested or to change or damage the chromosome structure in some other way"

"Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?"

"After Roger was asleep I took Jeffie [Carson?s cat] into the study and played the Beethoven violin concerto ? one of my favorites, you know. And suddenly the tensions of four years were broken and I got down and put my arms around Jeffie and let the tears come. With his little warm, rough tongue he told me that he understood. I think I let you see last summer what my deeper feelings are about this when I said I could never again listen happily to a thrush song if I had not done all I could. And last night the thoughts of all the birds and other creatures and the loveliness that is in nature came to me with such a surge of deep happiness, that now I had done what I could ? I had been able to complete it ? now it had its own life!"

"I know you dread the unpleasantness that will inevitably be associated with [the book?s] publication. That I can understand, darling. But it is something I have taken into account; it will not surprise me! You do know, I think, how deeply I believe in the importance of what I am doing. Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent? It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out ? to many thousands of people ? on something so important."

"About the book, I sometimes have a feeling (maybe 100% wishful thinking) that perhaps this long period away from active work will give me the perspective that was so hard to attain, the ability to see the woods in the midst of the confusing multitude of trees."

"It seems reasonable to believe ? and I do believe ? that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction."

"Mostly, I feel fairly good but I do realize that after several days of concentrated work on the book I?m suddenly no good at all for several more. Some people assume only physical work is tiring ? I guess because they use their minds little! Fridaynight ? my exhaustion invaded every cell of my body, I think, and really kept me from sleeping well all night."

"Sometimes ? I want [the book] to be a much shortened and simplified statement, doing for this subject (if this isn?t too presumptuous a comparison) what Schweitzer did in his Nobel Prize address for the allied subject of radiation."

"The other day someone asked Leonard Bernstein about his inexhaustible energy and he said ?I have no more energy than anyone who loves what he is doing.? Well, I?m afraid mine has to be recharged at times, but anyway I do seem just now to be riding the crest of a wave of enthusiasm and creativity, and although I?m going to bed late and often rising in very dim light to get in an hour of thinking and organizing before my household stirs, my weariness seems easily banished."

"Last night about 9 o?clock the phone rang and a mild voice said, ?This is William Shawn.? If I talk to you tonight you will know what he said and I?m sure you can understand what it meant to me. Shamelessly, I?ll repeat some of his words ? ?a brilliant achievement? ? ?you have made it literature? ?full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.? ? I suddenly feel full of what Lois once called ?a happy turbulence.?"

"This is a book about man?s war against nature, and because man is part of nature it is also inevitably a book about man?s war against himself."

"When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence ? it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half-truth."

"By long tradition, the agencies responsible for these resources have been directed by men of professional stature and experience, who have understood, respected, and been guided by the findings of their scientists."